CHAPTER 1

Other People’s Music

Music itself [is] the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.

CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS, The Raw and the Cooked

A few years ago I visited Hong Kong as a member of an evaluation committee for a university humanities program. At one juncture, the committee was taken to a courtyard where students in the program had set up an exhibit and were available to discuss it. In the same courtyard, some music students had set up a stage with an assortment of African drums, occasionally trying them out. We visited for a while with the humanities students and then gathered in preparation to leave. One of the music students called out, “Professors can drum, too!” To my surprise, the professor in charge of us said, “Well, we do have about five minutes.” So we each grabbed a drum. A student musician demonstrated some alternative ways to strike the drums, and we began drumming, our strong beats more or less in tandem, while our music student host drummed counterrhythms. We were refreshed and jovial when we boarded the van that was to take us to our next appointment a few minutes later. There we encountered one of the local members of our committee, who had briefly gone to her office to attend to some business. “Did you hear all that noise?” she asked. “That was us,” one of our group replied. She laughed and said, “No, I mean the drumming.” “That was us,” the same person repeated, and all of us erstwhile drummers burst out laughing.

This scene—academics from Asia, Europe, and North America exhilarated by African drums and rhythms—illustrates one of the central themes of this book: people from around the globe can be brought together by one another’s music. Occasions like this, in which people from various cultures enjoy music, bring to mind the adage that music is a universal language. But this saying has lost its currency, however much music seems to communicate. My purpose in this book is to reassess this idea. Although I will suggest that the notion of music as a language is of limited usefulness, I aim to rehabilitate the notion that music is a significant means of cross-cultural communication. Music, I will contend, is an important part of what makes us human as well as a vehicle for recognizing—and directly experiencing—our common humanity. By enabling us to feel our interconnection as human beings, music can help to make us more humane. But for this impact to affect our cross-cultural inter actions, we need to broaden our musical horizons to encompass music beyond our own culture.

HOW UNIVERSAL IS THE UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE?

Once upon a time, music was said to be a universal language. Verbal languages varied from place to place, so the reasoning went, and speakers of different languages could not usually understand each other; but music moved people across linguistic boundaries. Germans who spoke no Italian could still understand Italian music. In fact, they could do more than understand it. They could embrace it as speaking of their own inner life. They might not understand the words someone sang, but they could feel the emotion expressed. Friedrich Nietzsche acknowledges music’s independent emotional power when he remarks,

With just a little more impertinence, Rossini would have had everyone sing nothing but la-la-la-la—and that would have made good, rational sense. Confronted with the characters in an opera, we are not supposed to take their word for it, but the sound!¹

Over time the idea that music could speak to everyone became a piece of common wisdom. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is credited with the line, “Music is the universal language of mankind”; but others—including Arthur Schopenhauer, Charles Batteux, Eduard Hanslick, and E. T. A. Hoffmann—made the same point in similar words. The idea retains currency among musicians, particularly those whose music gets classified as “world music.” Mandawuy Yunupingu, spokesman and founder of the Aborigine group Yothu Yindi claims, “Music is a universal language without prejudice.” Peter Gabriel asserts, “Music is the universal language. There is nothing more powerful, more moving.” ² I could cite many other musicians saying more or less the same thing.

Nevertheless, the maxim is less commonplace than it once was, and skeptics are convinced that they have grounds for their doubts. Not that Germans have ceased to understand Italian music and vice versa. But as Europeans began to encounter music from Asia, they realized that not all music resembled that of their own societies. In fact, some of it seemed unintelligible. What should they make of these strange sounds from distant lands?

European theorists in the nineteenth century commonly held that other people’s music was less advanced than that of Europe. Music everywhere aimed at the same basic organization, even if some nations had yet to attain it. The explanation that some nations lagged behind in musical development served to account for various features of so-called primitive music. Such music was considered redundant, too simplistic, too raucous, or just plain out of tune. Charles Darwin’s characterization of the music of “savage” peoples is fairly typical:

But we must not judge of the tastes of distinct species by a uniform standard; nor must we judge by the standard of man’s taste. Even with man, we should remember what discordant noises, the beating of tom-toms and the shrill notes of reeds, please the ears of savages. Sir S. Baker remarks, that “as the stomach of the Arab prefers the raw meat and reeking liver taken hot from the animal, so does his ear prefer his equally coarse and discordant music to all other.”³

A common nineteenth-century view was that “primitive” music had emerged from societies that had embarked, but gone only some way, on the journey toward tonal music, with all its potential for intricate structure and drama. The tonal system of music, a European discovery, was the apex of musical progress. At least implicitly, it was posited as a universal goal.⁴

Some proponents of the theory of musical progress were at least interested in why some foreign music sounded alien and not just undeveloped. John Pyke Hullah in England recognized that music from other cultures was often organized on different principles than those underlying Western tonality. “How can there be music acceptable to one comparatively civilized people and altogether unacceptable, unintelligible even to another? The answer is to be found in the different nature of their musical system.” Yet he continues:

It is difficult enough for an ear trained in the nineteenth century to reconcile itself to the various modes used in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But to reconcile itself to another system seems impossible. Happily it is not in the least necessary. The European system, though the exigencies of practice prevent its being absolutely true, is nearer the truth than any other.⁵

Through the twentieth century, the view that one could reasonably restrict one’s gaze to Western music remained commonplace. As recently as 1977, a graduate student in music at an Ivy League university told me that while other societies of course had music, “there is only one culture in which music became an art.” In 1986 Judith Becker challenged the alleged superiority of Western music in print, suggesting that the position was still seriously held.⁶ A view only slightly less extreme continues to have adherents today, even among the most thoughtful and musically knowledgeable.

Roger Scruton, for example, is well aware that the music of the world operates according to multifarious structural principles. Indeed, he draws attention to structural diversity even within modern Western music. Yet he betrays no qualms about restricting his attention to Western music, and he argues that tonal music as it became formulated in the West is the optimal employment of musical resources.⁷ In his impressive book The Aesthetics of Music, he contends that the superiority of Western musical culture is demonstrated by its discovery of tonality and its development of multivoiced counterpoint. “The distinction between melody and bass is known in many cultures; so too is the distinction between melody and harmony,” he acknowledges. “But how many cultures pay this kind of detailed attention to the inner voice, and attempt to compose harmonies from independent melodic lines?”⁸ “Our tradition,” he concludes, “could fairly claim to be the richest and most fertile that has yet existed.”⁹

Scruton elsewhere comments, “The suspicion of tonality, like Marx’s suspicion of private property . . . should be seen for what it is: an act of rebellion against the only way we have of making sense of things.”¹⁰ Charles Rosen rightly criticizes this remark:

The claim that Western tonality is the only way music can make sense ignores the different ways other civilizations have organized their music. Scruton, however, wants to have nothing to do with non-tonal Oriental systems. “For three hundred years,” he writes, “Japan remained cut off from Western art music, locked in its grisly imitations of the Chinese court orchestras, dutifully producing sounds as cacophonous to local ears as the croaking of jackdaws.” Scruton obviously is not interested in being politically correct, but it is curious that he doesn’t know that when the Japanese first heard Western tonal music in the late sixteenth century (when the Jesuits came to Japan), they were horrified at the unpleasant noise it made. . . . At any rate, he . . . at least admits that experts can make sense of non-tonal music, though even experts cannot understand it from experience but only because they are able to decode it.¹¹

The Western atonal music that Scruton acknowledges (but interprets as implicitly tonal or meaningless) is only one type of music that has been organized on other bases besides tonality. Scruton fails to grant that tonality is only one of the bases on which music can be valued—or that Western tonal music can sound just as alien to those accustomed to their societies’ nontonal music as atonal music sounds to him. This is brought home by James Garson’s anecdotal report of taking Pandit Nikhil Banerjee to a concert in which Mstislav Rostropovich performed Bach’s Cello Suites. When Garson asked afterward how he had liked the concert, Banerjee remarked, “He played out of tune the entire time; he didn’t develop any of the themes; and it sounded almost like the music was written out in advance.”¹² In a similar vein, musicologist Curt Sachs (1881–1959) described the distinguished Albanian folk musician who attended a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and commented, “Fine—but very, very plain.” Sachs attributed this judgment to the Albanian’s expectation of more variegated rhythm than one gets in Beethoven’s evenly metered music.¹³

One might also point to musical cultures that attend much more than the West to the way in which particular tones are articulated in performance. Japanese music exploits the range of possibilities for attacks and releases of individual tones.¹⁴ So does much Chinese music, in particular that involving the qin (or ch’in, pronounced “chin”), an unfretted lute, which is so sensitive that ambient air currents can produce sounds. Even the grain of one’s fingerprints encountering the strings can be heard. To play the qin well the performer must learn a vast number of nuances of touch.¹⁵ In his paeans to the achievements of Western music, Scruton does not acknowledge that other cultures have often had different musical aims, and that their achievements should be judged accordingly.

The view that non-Western music has not achieved the artistic distinction of Western music has declined over time, in part because of more extensive Western encounters with music from outside Europe. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, when “world music” is a marketing category for the recording industry, it is difficult for us to remember how recently the West gained its exposure to the rest of the world’s music. Certainly, there was some awareness of non-Western music during the so-called Age of Discovery, when European navigators explored the globe in search of knowledge and riches. Sir Francis Drake, for example, describes in his captain’s log his first encounter with Javanese music in 1580. “Raia Donan coming aboard us . . . presented our Generall with his country musick, which though it were of a very strange kind, yet the sound was pleasant and delightfull.”¹⁶ Drake’s report, however, had no immediate consequence on European musical experience, or on Western musical theory. Non-European music was relegated by Western culture to the status of exotica, where it remained until the dawn of the twentieth century.

At the 1889 Paris World’s Fair, the Exposition Universelle, for which the Eiffel Tower was built, Claude Debussy and Paul Dukas (composer of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice) attended the concerts of the Javanese gamelan and the musical theater from Cochin, China, presented in the Palais du Trocadéro.¹⁷ The tuning of the Javanese instruments was affected by the long sea voyage, and it is not clear how much the sounds Debussy and Dukas heard actually resembled music heard in Java.¹⁸ Nevertheless, Debussy was so inspired by this exposure to Javanese music that it motivated a new direction in his compositions, the use of a whole-tone scale of six steps. For Debussy, Javanese music was more than a mere novelty. Clearly under the sway of the noble savage myth, he wrote in 1913,

There were, and there still are, despite the evils of civilization, some delightful native peoples for whom music is as natural as breathing. Their conservatoire is the eternal rhythm of the sea, the wind among the leaves and the thousand sounds of nature which they understand without consulting an arbitrary treatise. Their traditions reside in old songs, combined with dances, built up throughout the centuries. Yet Javanese music is based on a type of counterpoint by comparison with which that of Palestrina is child’s play. And if we listen without European prejudice to the charm of their percussion we must confess that our percussion is like primitive noises at a county fair.¹⁹

The romantic view of the “natives” and their music notwithstanding, what strikes me as most interesting in this comment is that Debussy was taking the achievements of Javanese music seriously. The highly developed rhythms and counterpoint not only struck him as remarkable, they also suggested new possibilities for Europeans to explore.

Most of Debussy’s contemporaries among European composers were not as interested as he in the nature of non-Western music on its own terms. But his experiments with musical resources derived from non-Western music exposed his listeners to sounds outside the purview of what they had taken to be music heretofore. If music was the universal language, accordingly, it was a language of which they were to some degree ignorant.

Early twentieth-century composition led some listeners to question the universality of music on other grounds. Experimental forms, such as dodecaphonic music and serial music, were constructed on the basis of different principles from the familiar tonal framework. The formal structures involved in such music were universal in the sense that they did not hail from any particular tradition; but they were far from universal in the sense of being understood by all who heard them. Many Westerners who encountered such music had difficulty understanding it, and they were thus led to doubt their ability to make sense even of some of the music produced in their own societies, let alone music from foreign lands.

Probably the most important development for precipitating widespread awareness of other cultures’ music was the development and widespread dissemination of recording technology. Recordings documenting the diversity of music provided definitive evidence that the world’s music is not all constructed in the same way. The tape recorder, in particular, enabled ethnographers to preserve the sonic impressions of non-Western music and to play it at great distances from its original production. Listeners no longer needed to go to the source, or have the source come to them, in order to hear music vastly different from that of their own culture. Eventually, some elements of non-Western music became not only available but also popular for certain Western audiences. George Harrison’s introduction of a sitar into the Beatles’ and his own solo works and Paul Simon’s collaboration with the South African group Ladysmith Black Mambazo on his Graceland album are only two of the better known cases of this development becoming mainstream in the West.²⁰ Certainly, the appropriation of features of non-Western music by Western musicians does not establish that cross-cultural communication has been accomplished. Whether such musical borrowing replicates the long-term tendency of Westerners to exploit non-Western resources for their own benefit is worth pondering. My point here is that recordings have enabled individuals in far-flung nations to be aware of one another’s music as well as to be influenced and to incorporate features of it into their own musical productions.

Recordings also decontextualized music, removing it from its original context (if only the studio in which it has been engineered) and potentially resituating it in diverse cultural settings, where it might be interpreted in various ways. This, as we shall see, complicates any effort to assess or even to track music’s role in cross-cultural communication. Recordings combined with international travel, musical broadcasting, and the Internet have resulted in musical diasporas and transnational exchanges that call into question the very idea of distinct musical cultures. It would be hard to find many places in the world in which music has been culturally insular. We all enjoy hybridized music to a greater or lesser extent. One of my primary aims in this book is to defend the value of being open to exploring music from across the globe— however foreign or startling it initially sounds. The widespread diffusion of music of various cultural origins indicates that many people throughout the world have found such openness rewarding and supports my point that the boundaries dividing cultural groups are musically porous.

While we should not overly reify the notion of a musical culture, particularly in light of the fast pace of current transnational musical transfers, I will continue to make reference to “Western” and “non-Western” music in this book. The reason is that I am interested in how music permeates cultural barriers, and I am defending the importance of taking philosophical account of a wider swath of music than the (traditional) Western music on which Western philosophers typically focus. It is convenient to continue to refer to the music developed outside the Western world as “non-Western” in contrast. I want to consider the extent to which music that is quite unfamiliar can nevertheless become accessible to those who lack the background that would be presupposed in its originating context. For Westerners, this is likely to be especially evident in the cases of “traditional” non-Western music that is minimally (or not at all) influenced by Western musical tendencies.

Another reason for referring to non-Western cultures is that in accounting for the reasons that some foreign music can be jarring, I make use of the notion of internalized templates that individuals employ to orient themselves in music. Making reference to “Western,” and “non-Western” music (as well as music from cultures that are more precisely specified) is a means of indicating the distinct sets of expectations that members of various societies have learned from their cultural environments, though these may be evolving. My ultimate aim is to suggest that such divergences, even when they are extensive, are not absolute barriers dividing musical cultures.

NON-WESTERN MUSIC AND WESTERN PHIlOSOPHY

Although the West in general has been slow to pay much attention to non-Western music, contemporary audiences have grown enthusiastic, at least in principle, to music from elsewhere. The burgeoning popularity of what is marketed as “world music” testifies to the fact that a significant Western audience has become interested in what the rest of the world has to offer. Even if most academic music departments in the West continue to concentrate on Western music of the classical tradition, programs and departments of ethnomusicology are flourishing.²¹ In psychology a growing number of studies dealing with music make efforts to test hypotheses cross-culturally, and even more acknowledge the importance of such work. Musicologist David Huron expresses a view that has become increasingly widespread when he remarks, “It may be that all of the important lessons regarding music can be found in Western music. But who would be so presumptuous as to assume this to be the case before we investigate the matter thoroughly?”²²

In contemporary scholarship Western philosophy is the outlier in its approach to non-Western music. On the whole, the field ignores it. Even within the philosophy of music, those indicating more than passing interest in non-Western music are few.²³ Peter Kivy, for example, while admirably considering the many ways that the stylistic characteristics of one’s native musical culture affects one’s ability to hear expressiveness in music, still concludes, “it must suffice for our purposes to acknowledge that breaking the culture barrier is at least very difficult, and conclusions relying on such perilous doings, perilous themselves.”²⁴

My response is that we need not to be so cautious. To the obvious counter that our knowledge of unfamiliar foreign music is necessarily too limited to guide philosophical investigation, I counter that we should not restrict our focus to music about which we have become expert. To do so is to distort the nature of much of actual musical experience.²⁵ Aspects of musical experience that have been undertheorized philosophically include the situation of encountering unfamiliar music and the processes through which we broaden our musical horizons. Indeed, as we will consider, we have reason to believe that the process of gaining an orientation in previously unfamiliar music is much more rapid than we might imagine prima facie.

Failure to attend to the full gamut of music is a loss for philosophy. Philosophy of mind, for example, is impoverished if music is not taken into account. Broad acknowledgment of the importance of music would challenge the adequacy of philosophical models that see the structure of language as the structure of thought. Unless music and language parallel each other in every respect, we should be open to the possibility that music illuminates features of thought that language does not. At the same time, greater philosophical attention to the ways that language resembles music (as opposed to the other way around) might result in a reconsideration of linguistic communication, particularly regarding the importance of pragmatics in the generation of meaning. Too often music is modeled on conceptions of language in which syntax and semantics are taken as primary, with the consequence that “music” is understood principally in terms of structures apart from context. We should include in our purview music from societies and musical subcultures in which conformity to a score notating pitches and rhythms is not a standard basis for judging the acceptability of performances. Recognition of the fact that “music” is not restricted to sonic phenomena that accord with Western structural principles and conventions is important for understanding music’s place in human life and thought.

In philosophy of music, more specifically, attention to the full range of music, including that from outside the West, is imperative if the subfield is to deal adequately with its subject matter. Among the particular topics that would be better addressed if the full range of music were considered are (1) the nature and extent of musical universality, (2) the ways in which music and emotion are connected, (3) the political and propagandistic roles of music, and (4) the ethical impact of music. In this book I will make some preliminary forays into discussion of the first three of these topic areas in light of an inclusive notion of music that is not limited to music of the West.²⁶

INVESTIGATIONS OF MUSICAL UNIVERSALITY

My focus in this book will not be non-Western music as such. Instead my topic is the notion of musical universality. I will be concerned with both its extent and its limitations, and the potential it may offer for stimulating a sense of our affinity as human beings. I will begin by considering ubiquitous features of human music and the extent to which they facilitate cross-cultural affiliation and understanding.

In chapter 2 I address the extent to which musical universality, in the sense of music’s ubiquity, might extend not only to all human beings but to some species of animals as well. Despite current scholarly caution regarding the term universality, I will go on in the next two chapters to draw attention to apparently universal features of perceiving, structuring, and appreciating music. Although such universals only take us so far in making sense of extremely foreign music, they offer a means of access that enables us to take pleasure in such music from early in our exposure to it. They also ground the possibility of our coming to understand music more fully as our acquaintance with it grows.

Chapters 3 and 4 focus on universals and near-universals that appear to operate in the human experience of music and the extent to which these enable cross-cultural musical understanding. Although they ensure that music from anywhere on the globe will be addressed to faculties that we share with others in our species, they also enable the development of schemata that can interfere with comprehension of foreign music. I will conclude that while the universals of music cannot ensure cross-cultural communication of all, or even most, dimensions of musical meaning, they are grounds on which such communication can be initiated.

The language model that has traditionally been used to summarize music’s universal character is my concern in chapter 5. In this chapter I suggest that the linguistic model obscures powers of music that are disanalogous to those of language, as well as the ways in which language relies more on “musical” characteristics than is commonly recognized. Regarding the idea that music is a kind of language, I suggest that we stand to gain by considering the metaphor in reverse.²⁷ Given the similarities between music and language, we have as much warrant for considering language a music as the other way around. If my arguments strike some readers as overemphasizing certain features of language to the deficit of others, this will only reinforce my points that the two are not exact parallels and that pushing the comparison results in an imbalanced and overly narrow understanding.

Chapter 6 considers a basis for musical communication that draws on sensory associations. Synesthesia (broadly understood) is a ubiquitous feature of musical response. However, although some associations that are grounded on synesthetic analogies refer to common features of human experience, many are more culturally specific, as are the interpretations that are given to them. The result is that some aspects of musical experience that draw on its synesthetic character can interfere with cross-cultural musical intelligibility, although others can assist it.

The emotional aspects of musical experience, by contrast, involve considerable cross-cultural convergence, even though cultures play significant roles in shaping both the arousal and the recognition of emotion in music. I consider music and emotion in chapters 7 and 8. Some of music’s emotional impact draws on features of musical experience (such as physiological responses to music) and participation that are not limited by cultural membership.

Certain recent debates within anglophone philosophy of music implicitly raise questions that touch on universality. Among the issues are: (1) the nature of the relationship between music and emotions, and (2) whether the notion of a hypothetical persona that undergoes emotional experience is a useful heuristic in making sense of music’s expressive character. I suggest that the various standard accounts of the music-emotion connection deal with different degrees of identification with the music that are available to listeners. Accordingly, they should be seen as complementary rather than as competitors. I also contend that the notion of a persona can be useful for tracking musical expression, so long as we adopt a suitably minimal definition. The use of such a thin definition, somewhat surprisingly, primes us for empathizing broadly with the wide variety of people who are also emotionally related to the music.

Chapter 8 considers an underappreciated aspect of music’s connection with emotion. I hold that a component of music’s emotional character is its role in establishing and reinforcing feelings of security, including a sense of ontological security, or secure being in the world. While some of the features of musical experience that link it to feelings of security are culturally specific (its connection to societal membership and associations, as well as deep familiarity with musical patterns), some are transcultural, depending in large part on the nature of musical perception.

I conclude with some reflections on music as a potential means for healing discord among subgroups of humanity. I acknowledge, as I must, that some of the very features of musical experience that facilitate bonding can be utilized for rallying one faction against another. However, while music clearly has the ability to reinforce sectarian divisions, the same mechanisms used for this purpose can also be directed toward more broadly humanizing ends. What I try to show in this book is that it is not naive to think that music can enable intensely shared affinity among participants who are to a large extent foreign to each other. In many ways—perceptually, affectively, and associationally— music can forge and further a sense of connection with other members of our species. What remains is for us to make use of music toward these ends.

I am hardly the first to defend the value of cross-cultural musical experience for promoting a sense of common humanity across cultural divides. Daniel Barenboim articulately defended such a message in his 2006 Reith Lectures.²⁸ My efforts to show that music’s universal dimensions provide grounds for facilitating our engagement with foreign music provide support for Barenboim’s claim. Our shared musicality is a real ground for developing a sense of human commonality across cultural boundaries, while the range of music we might encounter encourages appreciation of cultural diversity. In contemporary circumstances, in which listening is not restricted to specific contexts, music affords opportunities to experience human connectedness in a manner that transcends sectarianism. Such opportunities are needed in the contemporary world. Music has a role to play in healing exacerbated and contentious divisions, even if it is a mistake to consider it either possible or entirely desirable to eliminate divisions in the social world. We would do well to make more of music’s potential to help us recognize our human kinship, however varied our cultures.

POTENTIAL OBJECTIONS TO MY APPROACH

Before proceeding I should counter some potential objections to my discussion of musical universality. One of these is the complaint that I am endorsing an unwarranted essentialism in appealing to human nature and human characteristics. I recognize that essentialist analyses often amount to privileging one’s own outlook as the truth, applicable to everyone. But although appeals to human nature have gone out of fashion, partially in response to recognizing this danger, I think that it remains worthwhile to draw attention to those traits and relations among them that are characteristic of members of our species. My claim is that musicality—a disposition to make and enjoy music—is among these. If we imagine what generalizations extraterrestrial anthropologists might make about our species, one striking characteristic of human beings that I would expect them to note would be the human tendency to make and enjoy music.

I do not deny that cultures shape the way music is made and impress specific perceptual schemes on their members. My conviction that such differences are important will become increasingly apparent. But I am convinced that even the most adamant cultural constructivist presupposes certain capacities, both physical and psychological, that typify human beings. I will not try to articulate a complete definition of human nature. Indeed, I am among those who suspect that such efforts usually do project the tendencies of one’s own society onto all people everywhere. Nor will I weigh in on the question of whether music has evolved as an evolutionary adaptation, a spandrel, or something else. Nevertheless, I think that some notion of typical human traits is indispensable to many of our efforts in philosophy, which is concerned with big questions that are recurrently encountered in human life. One can, I believe, make use of some notion of what is typically human while nonetheless recognizing that one may be overgeneralizing from one’s own experience and being prepared to revise one’s views should this become evident. I will attempt to maintain such a stance.

A related objection is that I too easily accept psychologists’ and linguists’ claims about universal features of perception. Admittedly, this is a problem in that, at best, claims about musical universals have been supported by inductive evidence, and many studies have not endeavored to demonstrate the cross-cultural validity of their claims. At most these studies offer provisional grounds for accepting certain descriptions of musical perception as holding universally, and I acknowledge this up front. Empirical evidence is always falsifiable, and it is possible that some of the evidence I appeal to will be falsified by future research.²⁹ This demonstrates the importance of further empirical research that pays greater attention to cross-cultural similarities and differences.

To minimize the impact of the problem of overly hasty induction here, I will indicate noteworthy exceptions to generalized claims about universals. I will also use the available empirical evidence to suggest a general profile of human music (which is considerably more restricted than the range of sonic possibilities within our auditory frequency range would suggest) and to indicate perceptual grounds that underlie the experience (or “illusion”) of animation in music.³⁰ Even if certain alleged universals come to be rejected, others are likely to be confirmed, and this is sufficient to support my case. I would be extremely surprised if the science of auditory perception at its current stage has been wrong in all its generalizations.

A third potential objection to my approach is to challenge it on the grounds that it does not take the deaf into account. My response is that, far from being counterexamples, the deaf provide evidence for my position that musicality is a basic human trait. The deaf engage with and enjoy music, not sonically, but tactilely.³¹ The fact that this segment of the population, which is unable to access music through the sensory modality that most of us rely on, nevertheless experiences music through another sensory mode suggests how basic interaction with music is to virtually all members of our species. The exceptions are extremely atypical, examples being those who lose such basic cognitive capacities as appreciation of sensory pattern or capacity to track temporal sequence, such as some of the patients neurologist Oliver Sacks describes.³²

Another possible objection is that my focus on listeners’ experience distorts what music is. Philosophers often discuss music and its meaning from the standpoint of listeners, discussing the perspective of performers secondarily, if much at all. Psychologists, too, most often focus on listeners in their musical studies, presumably because the pool of listening subjects (at least in the West) is larger than that of those who would identify themselves as performers and because listening is more easily monitored in lab conditions than the activities involved in performance. Anthropologists and anthropologically oriented ethnomusicologists, however, tend to see this emphasis on listening as perverse and a reflection of one of the quirks of Western musical culture. In many societies, everyone is an active music-maker.³³ Some individuals may be particularly good at making music, but musical performance is not the province of experts.

Given that my audience is likely to be comprised primarily of Westerners, I cannot assume that most of my readers will consider themselves musical performers, desirable as such a state of affairs might be.³⁴ Nevertheless, I concede the importance of the anthropological/ethnomusicological point that music-making is essentially important for understanding music, and that “music” is more commonly understood in reference to this than to listening. I will finesse this point by referring at times to musical participants, taking listeners to be among them. Some empirical justification for considering listeners to be active participants comes from neuroscientific evidence of similar brain activation patterns in listeners and performers, notably in regions implicated in motor activity.³⁵ My taking both music-making and music partaking as modes of musical participation reflects the complexity of modern musical life even among those who are the most musically active. It encompasses the mutually enlivening roles that musicians and audience perform for each other in the context of live performance, and it acknowledges that music-makers are responsive to other music-makers, a possibility that depends upon listening. Finally, to consider listening a form of musical participation is to recognize that musical listening is not a purely passive form of consumption but is itself a mode of active engagement, mentally, physically, and emotionally.³⁶

A fifth possible objection is that I am reifying cultures when I refer to them as sources of musical meaning and interpretation. Although I am emphasizing the importance of culture in shaping musical activity and experience, I do not understand culture as a well-bounded concept. In a world in which we can easily encounter one another’s music, musical cultures are not isolated. Instead, they are influenced by one another. We should acknowledge the considerable extent to which the world’s music includes much that is hybridized, reflecting the increase of musical encounters and collaborations among members of different societies. I see these hybridizations as a reflection of music’s potential to facilitate cross-cultural encounter and communication of an unusually cooperative sort. If philosophy of music is to reflect the range of musical experience, including its emotional and ethical dimensions, such developments must be recognized. Even restricting our view to musical experience within the West, multicultural musical collaborations and transnational influences should be considered as a growing part of the musical terrain.

A sixth objection is that my analysis is overly focused on the individual experiencing music and insufficiently concerned with music as a social practice. Indeed, I will be discussing individuals’ responses to music and drawing on psychological experiments that study the responses of individual subjects. I do not mean to imply, however, that the values implicit in music are essentially matters of the intrapsychical processing of musical structures. Music has value to people by virtue of the way it is made and used. Cultures can and do contribute layers of meaning to musical patterns, as well as templates for making sense of musical structures. Even the structural characteristics of music express modes of valuing that extend beyond the context of music, and cultural values shape these. Cultural ideals for human interaction, as we shall see, are among the extramusical meanings implicit in music. While nonmembers of a culture may recognize these, the full emotional force of their musical reinforcement may be available only to members or long-term residents. Cultures also elaborate associations and symbolisms that are inextricably linked to music for its members.

No one experiences music outside of some cultural context; even infants in utero appear to be gaining acquaintance with the musical culture they will soon encounter more fully.³⁷ Those immersed in a culture will inevitably have a different and fuller perspective on that culture’s music than those who are not, although people can gradually become more assimilated to a foreign culture. Perfect transparency of musical communication is not available cross-culturally (nor even, perhaps, from one individual to another). What is available is real encounter through music among those whose backgrounds are significantly different and who express themselves musically in ways that may initially seem inaccessible to one another. Such encounter, I will argue, can be a step toward recognizing mutual humanity in an emotionally powerful way.